J Peder Zane
J Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist. He previously worked as a book review editor and book columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing won several national honors.
Conservatives give Kamala Harris and her allies too much credit when they say she is gaslighting Americans by insisting that Donald Trump is the second coming of Adolf Hitler and that his tens of millions of supporters are budding brown-shirts.
Gaslighting suggests calculated deception, a knowing attempt to spread useful lies. Democrats and their ‘Never Trump’ GOP confederates see themselves as truth tellers – they honestly believe their angry delusions are reality. Like most sufferers in the grip of derangement, they insist that visions which exist only in their minds are obvious facts. Hence, their closing argument is not so much a political ploy as a symptom of psychological distress.
This is not unusual. All human beings – even you and I – are constantly toggling between the rational and the irrational. Our minds are blenders of fact and fiction, of clear-eyed observations filtered through the lens of hope and fear. No one lives in the just-right Goldilocks zone. Day to day, even moment to moment, one side of our brain or the other can be ascendant. Healthy people, by and large, balance these forces. But it doesn’t take much, especially when we are under stress, to fall down the well of emotion. This is especially true when we act as members of groups, which often demand loyalty to, and thereby validate, unmoored ideas. The madness of crowds is real.
This is, in fact, the argument Democrats are making about Trump and his supporters. They say he has transformed the Republican Party a la Adolf Hitler, circa 1933, into a cult of personality. Like most wild ideas, this one has some faint grounding in reality. For good and ill, Trump has radically transformed the GOP from the party of Ronald Reagan to one more in his own populist image. Alas, he is no Reagan.
He is also no Hitler. Making such a comparison is a grave injustice to the memory of those who suffered at the hands of that genocidal monster. It suggests a profound ignorance of the German leader’s evil, and it may even encourage antisemitism – if Trump is Hitler, then Hitler was just Trump. It dangerously distorts the past, which is the only guidepost we have to navigate the future. Trump’s opponents are not just saying this, they believe it.
One can certainly argue that Trump should not be president of the United States. But, in a healthy democracy, such assertions must be based on evidence, not deranged claims. If he truly is beyond the pale, it should be easy to make the case without recourse to hateful fabrications. If the truth is on your side, why advance conspiracy theories that he colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election and that Jan 6 was an insurrection just like the Civil War? If he really is a racist, why repeatedly lie about his “fine people on both sides” comments following the Charlottesville violence? If he bungled the response to Covid, why repeat the canard that he told Americans to inject bleach?
From a psychological standpoint, the telling point about these and so many other falsehoods Democrats and Never Trumpers put forth is that they continue to repeat them long after they have been debunked. It is the insistence of troubled souls that their unmoored perceptions are reality. The depth of their problem is underscored by reports that their apocalyptic warnings are not resonating with swing voters. They persist in this self-defeating behavior because they can’t help themselves.
Yes, Trump and his followers not only spread, but believe, their share of lies. A key difference, however, is the sheer ferocity of the Democrats’ attacks and their unquestioned embrace within their crowd. I know many conservatives who will vote for Trump despite their many misgivings. It is hard to find a Democrat who will admit that Harris is a deeply flawed candidate fomenting division. For proof, scan the headlines of the New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, NPR, the Atlantic, etc.
Although one can argue that Trump has tipped his opponents into madness, the form it is taking has deep historical roots. The leopard cannot change its spots and neither can the Democratic Party.
A political institution apparently doesn’t master the art of fear and division during the nation’s first century and a half when it was the voice of slavery and Jim Crow – and then drop that skill set. Instead, it has merely been reapplied to one’s new enemies. The ‘negro menace’ has been replaced by white ‘Christian nationalists.’ Their racist depictions of blacks as a violent threat have been repurposed into grave warnings about working-class whites. So, too, have their previous claims about the intellectual inferiority of blacks simply been refashioned like some kind of toxic boomerang aimed at the people Hillary Clinton described as “deplorables.”
From Clinton’s dismissal of many Trump voters as “irredeemable” to President Biden’s recent description of them as “garbage,” Democrats have made their contempt for millions of Americans clear. But, if one truly believes those voters are supporting Hitler, you can see where they get this kind of language.
Both Democrats and Republicans have worked to demonize their opponents. But we are kidding ourselves if we don’t recognize that the bile from the left – which still controls the media and so many other levers of power – is more extreme and more dangerous. They have tipped into mad hatred that will not be cured by the results of a single election. If Harris wins, Democrats will continue their tireless effort to delegitimize their opponents.
If Trump wins, I fear to imagine where their madness will lead.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
